The buzz on the Internet in recent days is that scientist Stephen Hawking said black holes do not exist. Did he say that?

A very accessible article explains the whole dust up on LiveScience.com, which says that:

Hawking has published a new black hole study — "Information Preservation and Weather Forecasting for Black Holes" — Jan. 22 through the preprint journal arXiv.org

In it he revises some views on the event horizon, which refers to the point of no return at which not even light can escape from the black hole.

Hawking's two-page study attempts to resolve the issue by doing away with event horizons and replacing them with the idea of "apparent horizons."

In 1974, Hawking found that matter and energy can escape a black hole through what is now known as Hawking radiation.

However, other scientists aren't so sure about Hawking's ideas.

Another good summary of the debate is found at space.com, which states:

What Hawking is saying is that, with quantum mechanics included, the notion of a black hole as governed purely by the equations of general relativity, the “classical black hole”, does not exist, and the event horizon, the boundary between escape and no-escape, is more complex than we previously thought. But we’ve had inklings of this for more than 40 years since his original work on the issue.